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Hello! My name is Micah, but I usually go by MikeUtah here and elsewhere on the interwebs. I left the church in mid 2008, along with my wife and 3 kids. We live in Utah County and have found a growing community of accepting people. I come from a large family of still believing Mormons but have reached a nice balance of live-and-let-live arrangement and still enjoy their company. At 33, I am grateful for the perspectives gained from leaving the church and seeing the world in an ever more impartial and accepting attitude. Life is a gift, and the experience breath taking. Me in a nutshell.

I left the church around 1996. I had returned from a mission in 1994 and started studying the church. It was hard back then because the internet was still in its infancy and I had no support group like this site. I grew tired of studying the church after 5 years.

I never thought much about the church until 2012, when I started thinking about the spirit which I still feel and which still guides me but which I feel is bigger than the chuch.

But what really tiggered me to seek out other "apostates" on this site, was I then met a girl who was a former return missionary and also an "apostate". We clicked so much and I realized that no matter how much I don't believe in Mormonism, no matter how far away I live from the intermountain west, Mormonism will always be an important part of who I am - the culture and the way I interact with the world will always be strongly influenced by my Mormon past.

For those who are in the DC area please see this meetup group, and join us:

I am still on the books of being Mormon, but, when I moved about 10 years ago, I never told the church where I have moved to. But, I took a class at a local community college a few years later, I didn't reconize the name of who was teaching the class, and it ended up being a guy that was in my ward, and he must have updated my information to the church because a few weeks later, I had the missionary's knocking on my door asking for me. I do not feel in my heart that the Mormon Church is the one true church, but at the same time I understand that for prople who grew up in the church and still have parents and siblings still attend, it's hard for them to break away from it.

Hi, may name is Gene and I was very active until I was over 60 years old. I served a mission in Denmark and thought Gospel Doctrine for 12 years. I have served in most callings in a ward except Bishop. Even as a missionary; there was always something that bothered me, so I guess that I was never a TBM even when I was super-active. I hated the doctrine (non-doctrine, let’s ignore that) on people with black skin and viewed polygamy as Joseph receiving revelation from other than is brain. I had always beaten up on the Gospel Doctrine teachers who quoted Mormon Doctrine. Then came Prop H(8) here in California; and I just admitted that I belonged to a cult. I moved to United Methodist because they did have any of the silly doctrine that I was raised with. I applaud you younger folk who are smarter than I am and are getting out earlier. I am always open to contact from people.

Hi, Gene, and all. I am not a Mormon; I was raised in the Catholic church,and for many years I participated in the rites and rituals mindlessly because that's what I was taught (brainwashed?) to do. When I went off to college, I discovered that there are other ways of thinking, other views on religion, and that I was not required to be Catholic. It was a revelation. Since then I've been agnostic bordering on atheist. I have been interested (purely from an academic and curiousity standpoint) in the Mormon church for years, and when I read a book by Sally Denton about the massacre at Mountain Meadows, it inspired me to begin researching the LDS "church", which I had already begun to suspect was a cult. The more I dug into it, the more I began to view LDS and particularly FLDS as a dangerous fraud and a cult with a long reach and a death-grip on its members. This led me to write a novel, A MORMON MASSACRE, based partly on the Mountain Meadows incident, but also because I was so baffled by the beliefs of those who followed the LDS doctrines. I am very interested in communicating with ex-Mormons or Doubting Mormons, and I want to offer anyone in these groups the opportunity to read the first two chapters of my novel. I would be happy to send a free ecopy of these first two chapters to you or anyone in the group. Just msg me here or email me at rinald47@hotmail.com. The book is available on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/A-MORMON-MASSACRE-ebook/dp/B008R26S18 for anyone who wants to get a look at the cover, take a peek inside, or read any of the reviews about the book.

Smarter possibly only because we had the interweb sooner than you did :) ..I reckon you're probably an incredibly brave guy to leave it behind after such a long time. I was 27 when I left the church and it literally destroyed me inside, and at the same time cut ties with my family and most of my friends, so I can only imagine how tough it might have been for you. Sure, it hurts.. and still does, but there's more support available for people like us now thanks to technology :) ..and good on you for getting out when you could

I'm LovesLaboursLost (or LLL for short). Some of you know my real name, but that's a privilege, not a right. :)

I started questioning the validity of the church at a young age, and really started to ask questions while I was in my mid-late teens. I was told that it was Satan at work, that God must have big plans for me (or, better yet, my future spouse) and was trying to plant a seed of doubt. I was always looked down upon within the ward as an odd-ball, someone who might influence your child to explore the world around them. My fear of being exiled from my community squashed my interests in the church's disconnects for several years.

I decided to fake-it-till-I-made-it, and was still faking it until I was 20 and 3 years gone away from my parents' house. It was at that time that I took the challenge to read the BoM, Bible and really work hard to gather a testimony of my own. I did everything in a way that was Church approved, and had the revelation :D that the LDS church was in fact not true. As I've continued researching the church, this revelation has continuously been supported. I am never going back to the mo-mos.

Nevertheless, my name is still in the books as I figure out how to negotiate what and when to tell my parents my true feelings...despite the fact that I'm almost 25 now :)